Hanna Pitkin's recent two-part essay in this Review, “Obligation and Consent”, raises a vital problem worth discussing at greater length, the question of why a final authority—a “last word”—proves necessary in political matters or at least why we seem predisposed to think in terms of a final authority even though one may not actually exist. The following remarks constitute a response to this question.

Professor Pitkin's approach is influenced by Oxford philosophy's accent on studying the role of language in moral judgments. She adds to this linguistic interest a complementary concern for “life” as well. Thus, she says, “What is ultimately needed here [on the questions of obligation and consent] is a better understanding of the role played in our language and our lives by assessments like ‘he was right’, ‘he made a bad decision,’ ‘he betrayed the cause,’ and the like.” But who is to say, she asks? Her answer is: “each person who cares to, will say …. No one has the last word because there is no last word. But in order to make that clear, one would have to say a great deal more about how language functions, and why we are so persistently inclined to suppose that there must be a last word.” Let us first take the question, who is to say? Then we shall move to the second, connected issue, why there must be a last word. Finally, we shall explore briefly the idea that we must know more about how language functions in order to solve certain conundrums concerning obligation and consent.

Contrary to some belief, there are some, and possibly many, conditions under which survey research techniques can be put to use in the study of judicial decision-making. The present note reports on the successful use of such a technique in the collection and analysis of data drawn directly from the judicial bench of the State of Hawaii. In this case the plan to utilize survey techniques arose out of consideration of a problem that has plagued students of judicial decision-making from the beginning, i.e., the problem of getting direct information about those judicial attitudes and orientations which might reasonably be expected to function as determinants of judicial decisions.

In an earlier study of the impact of judicial role orientation upon judicial decision-making, I tried to handle the problem of taking independent measures of actual judicial attitudes and orientations which could then be related to judicial decisions. My approach at the time was to use accessible and measurable law students as stand-ins for actual judges. In contrast to this approach most of the political “judicial behavioralists,” while collecting data on actual functioning judges, do not attempt to solve the problem in any way. For these scholars continue to reason tautologically from information contained mainly in judicial votes and secondarily in judicial opinions, leaving us with such essential conclusions, in effect, as: “conservative” decisions are made by “conservative” judges, etc. Who is to say which is the worst procedure: the “judicial behavioralists,” which collects irrelevant data from relevant persons; or my own, which collects relevant data from irrelevant persons?

Despite advice to the contrary, I decided to try my hand at direct surveys of a judiciary, i.e., the one closest at hand.